Allow me to have an Andy Rooney moment: What is WRONG with
kids these days?! All they do is listen to crazy, horrible “rocky
roll,” play “Pong” on their crazy videogame machines, and figure out
new crazy ways of killing themselves on the TubeYou interweb! Speaking
of which, why does my great-granddaughter insist on using interweb
e-letter writing? Is the art of calligraphy lost? When I was her age,
we wrote proper letters using the Queen’s English. Then we’d seal that
correspondence with wax, apply our family crest, send the missive via a
trustworthy horseman, and four months later, the letter would arrive!
That’s why I wait four months to respond to any of my
great-granddaughter’s interweb mails, and have written her out of my
will—because she’s a newfangled and ungrateful little whore.
WHOA! That’s the trouble with channeling Andy Rooney—once you
go to that dark place, it’s almost impossible to return. HOWEVER! I do
agree with Andy Rooney on one thing: A generation of young people will
grow up completely disfigured and gross because they won’t stop acting
all “ex-TREEEEEEME” on YouTube! Example: Go to YouTube and search for
the word “faceplant.” There are 8,540 videos under this title, almost
all of which include some young person performing an activity which
ends in his face getting smashed into cement, and his brains oozing out
of his squash.
Natural selection? Maybe. But does that mean MTV gets to make money
from it? This week MTV is debuting two new shows in which
knuckle-dragging young men try to one-up Jackass—with
brain-damaging results.
• Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory (Sun Feb 8, 9 pm).
Apparently there’s some sort of four-wheeled device called a “scoot
board,” upon which young people like to kill themselves. I’m assuming
Rob Dyrdek is one of these “scoot boarders” who has built a
25,000-square-foot “fantasy factory” in which he and his friends
attempt all sorts of “ex-TREEEEEEME” “scoot board” tricks, crack their
heads on the floor, and then emerge from the hospital drooling and
unable to distinguish the difference between a banana and a cow.
• Nitro Circus (Sun Feb 8, 10 pm). The problem
with regular, boring circuses? Not “nitro-y” enough! They lack a
certain… oh, how do you say… “ex-TREEEEEEMity.” Thankfully, someone
named Travis Pastrana (apparently some famous “freestyle
motor-scooter-cross rider”?) and his “totally insane” buddies have a
show in which they top each other’s idiotically retarded stunts on a
weekly basis. For example: Backflipping a motor scooter over a ravine,
or jumping a Big Wheel 40 feet into the air onto a crowded boat dock
(crippling innocent bystanders is so “ex-TREEEEEEME”). Dig this quote
from the show’s press release: “The Nitro Circus crew is a group
of tight-knit, highly skilled, adrenaline-addicted friends who always
take the action ‘to 11’ with the hammer down.”
See, now I know they’re “ex-TREEEEEEME”—only a brain-damaged
person would’ve written that sentence. Wait… Andy Rooney is coming
back! I… I… AND ANOTHER THING. Why do they let teenagers hang out
at the mall? They scare me… AND THEY DON’T BUY ANYTHING!
